We estimate the aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the US manufacturing sector. We show that the aggregate elasticity of substitution can be expressed as a simple function of plant level structural parameters and sufficient statistics of the distribution of plant...

This paper studies an analytically tractable model of the formation and evolution of chains of production. Over time, entrepreneurs accumulate techniques to produce their good using goods produced by other entrepreneurs and labor as inputs. The value of a technique depends on both the...

Both the recent literature on production function identification and a considerable body of other empirical work on firm expansion assume a Cobb-Douglas production function. Under this assumption, all technical differences are Hicks neutral. I provide evidence from US manufacturing plants...

Under the production approach to markup estimation, the markup is the output elasticity of any variable input divided by the input’s share of revenue. However, output elasticities vary across producers due to non-neutral technological differences. I develop a flexible cost share estimator to...